The Sex Trap: Why Women Should Never Say Yes Before Marriage

DANIELLE CRITTENDEN

All the promises made to us about our ability to achieve freedom and independence as women, the promises of sexual emancipation may have been the most illusory.

Danielle Crittenden

In retrospect, it's
almost charming the way our teachers attempted to teach us about sex. Other generations
may have been left to grapple with this most intimate of topics in the dark, but
mine, beginning in the early 1970s, would be the first to be educated openly on
the subject in junior high school classrooms in the full light of day. At my high
school, the task fell to a gym teacher, who was also the football coach. He was
not, even at the best of times, an articulate man.

This wasn't usually a problem:
Most of what he needed to say could be grunted or shouted at a field of adolescents,
ordering them to tackle, kick, or run around until they threw up. Unfortunately,
for him, he found himself like everyone else in the 1970s at the
forefront of sexual enlightenment. Believing that such critical knowledge as birth
control and the functions of our sex organs could not be trusted to our stammering
and embarrassed parents, education officials passed the duty along to this stammering
and embarrassed gym teacher. Why it had to be the gym teacher, I'm not sure
perhaps because those same officials hoped to keep the topic safely within the
realm of the athletic and away from the romantic. That's also probably the reason
why they entitled the sex curriculum Health or some similar euphemism (as opposed
to Fellatio 101), and our textbook spoke about intercourse completely matter-of-factly,
as if it were no more fraught or controversial than the digestive system.

Of
course it was and is. The gym teacher knew it, and we knew it, I remember
him vividly, standing at the front of the classroom in his red Adidas track suit,
grimly tapping a pointer at a full-colour diagram of an enormous, bisected vagina.
So, uh, girls have ovaries, right? [tap,tap] And in their ovaries they have,
um, ovums, which are tiny eggs. They travel along here [pointer follows strands
of red ribbon to something that looks like a cross-section of a bloodied pear]
and, uh, sort of nest in here after they've been, um, fertilized by the sperm.
The teacher would attempt to deliver these lectures like a Soviet minister addressing
the United Nations monotonously, without a flicker of emotion

Having
sex, though, was obviously not like doing gym class or algebra. By approaching
it as coldly as any other subject, the curriculum managed to strip away all of
its ethical context . So while we learned to rattle off the most effective forms
of contraception as expertly as any prostitute, we never discussed under what
circumstances we should consider sex right or wrong. We were certainly not taught
as girls, that our ability to conceive imposed any special, or extra, responsibility
upon us to practise more restraint than boys. From the curriculum's view-point
men and women if different in basic plumbing shared essentially
the same sexual desires and were entitled to pursue them and express them in similar
ways. The prevailing wisdom then, as it is now, was that for too long, children
particularly girls had been kept ignorant of their bodies and taught
to be ashamed of their sexual desire. If left to our allegedly prudish and/or
ignorant parents, we might have been told not to have sex until we were older
or, more unrealistically, until we were married. But an enlightened education
system was one that understood the reality of teenage sexual behaviour and tried
to accommodate it rather than change it. They had not yet begun to hand out condoms
or instruct students in how to unroll them over bananas, but the assumptions that
led to these advances were all in place.

As my friends and I grew into young
women, our sexual experience may have varied, but our attitude toward sex did
not. You had sex with someone or you didn't. You regretted it or you enjoyed it.
You wanted to see him again or you never wanted to see him again. You sometimes
used a man or felt used by him. But unless you were unusually religious, you did
not think about sex as a privilege of marriage, or even of an especially devoted
relationship. If you were attracted to a man and he was attracted to you, you
expected to have sex with him as naturally as you expected a grey sky to rain
or spring to follow winter: the only questions were when and how. Carelessly,
thoughtlessly, casually, sex, in the short space of a single generation, went
from being the culminating act of committed love to being a pre-condition, a tryout,
for future emotional involvement. If any.

Today, few would still advocate the
heady, unbridled, anything-goes approach to sex that prevailed in the `70s. The
right to sleep with as many men as a woman pleases turns out to be a rather hollow
freedom at least, if a woman seeks more than a series of groping, bodily
encounters with men with whom she shares little but compatible sex organs. Anatole
France bitterly remarked, The law, in its majestic impartiality, forbids both
rich and poor to sleep under bridges. The woman who comes of age today quickly
discovers that she enjoys a similar guarantee of sexual equality: the right
to make love to a man and never see him again; the right to be insulted and demeaned
if she refuses a man's advances; the right to catch a sexually transmitted disease
that might, as a bonus, leave her infertile; the right to an abortion when things
go wrong, or, as it may be, the right to bear a child out of wedlock.

Indeed,
in all the promises made to us about our ability to achieve freedom and independence
as women, the promises of sexual emancipation may have been the most illusory.
These days, certainly, it is the one most brutally learned, at an early age, when
all the sexual bravado a girl may possess evaporates the first time a boy she
truly cares for makes it clear that he has no further use for her after his own
body has been satisfied. No amount of feminist posturing, no amount of reassurances
that she doesn't need a guy like that anyway, can protect her from the pain and
humiliation of those awful moments after he's gone, when she's alone and feeling
not sexually empowered but discarded. It doesn't take most women long to figure
out that sexual liberty is not the same thing as sexual equality.

There's a
crude Yiddish expression that sums up the ancient sexual bargain between men and
women: No chuppy, no schtuppy. It means, literally, No marriage, no sex. There's
that other cliche, too, muttered by disapproving mothers for generations: Why
buy the cow when they're giving away the milk for free? We may smirk at its primness,
but as women, even as liberated, sexually uninhibited women, we still know exactly
what it means. Men and women, by the very nature of their biology, have different,
and often opposing, sexual agendas. Eventually, most women want children and,
with them, a committed husband and father. Yet so long as there is no readily
understood and accepted way for women to say no to men they like and they hope
to see again, women lose their power to demand commitment from men. Our grandmothers
might have led more sheltered sex lives, but they also controlled what amounted
to a sexual cartel: setting a high price for sexual involvement and punishing
both men and women if they broke the agreement (either by forcing them into marriage
or by ostracizing them from respectable company). Sexual rules create sexual solidarity
among women. If men feel that they can flit from woman to woman, they will. They
will enjoy our ready availability and exploit it to their advantage. But if women
as a group cease to be readily available if they begin to demand commitment
(and real commitment, as in marriage) in exchange for sex-market conditions will
shift in favour of women.

This is, to put it mildly, an unfashionable idea.
To modern women, particularly young modern women, the loss of sexual freedom may
not seem worth it. And it would fly in the face of our sense of fairness
if men are not constrained, why should we be? Today, a woman's right to pursue
sexual pleasure is regarded with the same sanctity as her right to free speech.
An unhappy single woman may attempt to improve her life by giving up such things
as chocolate, fatty foods, and men who treat her badly, but she would never think
of surrendering her sexual liberty. That heady, impassioned moment when a woman
allows herself to give in to her desires when she chooses to sleep with
a man is as essential to her identity as a modern women as putting on a
suit and going out to work. Her sexual freedom is the expression indeed
the embodiment of her independence. And in expressing it willfully, selfishly,
and upon a whim, she can feel fully the sexual equal of a man. Even the most politically
conservative young women I know women who say they oppose abortion and
yearn to marry and have families would never disavow their right to sleep
with whomsoever they please.

A friend of mine, a very pretty woman in her early
20s, was at one point dating three men simultaneously, two of whom wanted to marry
her. She said she and her friends chuckle at the articles that occasionally appear
in the lifestyle sections of newspapers that suggest there is a shortage of marriageable
men. How could there be a shortage, when every woman she knew was beating them
off? But then she also acknowledged that these articles were usually written by
women older than herself, who had been preoccupied with establishing themselves
in their careers, who had felt strongly that they were too young to get married
at her age, only to realize belatedly that very few 35-year-old women have the
sexual power over men that they had at 25. And then my friend admitted that when
she and her friends were not beating away their suitors they were compulsively
discussing, what they were going to do with their lives. If they were too young
to get married now, then when? And whom would they marry?

Their uncertainty
about what it was, exactly, that they wanted to do pushed them into the quasi-serious
but ultimately unsatisfying relationships that define (or, rather, in their
ambiguity, fail to define) modern single life. These young women dated
meaning they went out to dinner with a number of men and got involved with
meaning, they slept with a number of others, their involvements lasting three,
maybe six, maybe eight months before fizzling out. Sometimes, an infatuated couple
would audition for marriage by deciding to live together. The exciting day of
renting the U-Haul would arrive, and the two would merge the collected belongings
of their single lives: his stereo and her sofa, his television and her frilly
bedskirt, his coffee table and her potted palm. They made their first exhilarating
trips to Pottery Barn and Crate & Barrel, choosing wineglasses and colourful plates
with which to entertain their friends in their new life as Committed Couple. But
the game of playing house together when it did not lead to marriage (as it usually
doesn't) led them to experience all the disadvantages of monogamy with few of
its benefits. Sex lost its initial passion and novelty. They would find themselves
engaged in petty arguments over who would tidy up and cook. And at the same time,
they lacked the emotional glue that binds people who have, simply through the
act of marrying, announced their intention to form a family and stick it out.
Instead, they came to occupy the position of the old married couple in their social
circle, while their friends continued to live romantic, adventurous, single lives
or so it suddenly appeared to them. And because they had signed a lease
on an apartment that neither could afford alone, they'd ensnared themselves. They
continued together long past the time they would have had they never moved in
with each other in the first place sometimes as much as a year or two longer.
And then they were overwhelmed by the bitter sense of wasted time.

So women
find themselves in a bewildering position: They want the benefits of the old sexual
deal (marriage and family), but they are unwilling to accept the sexual restraint
that brought the old deal into existence. Instead, a young woman thinks that things
will somehow simply fall together that when she chooses to retire from
the nightlife and settle down, there will be an ample selection of decent, solicitous
men eagerly waiting to marry her. And then she may well grow angry at the behaviour
of the men she meets men who like receiving their benefits from the new
sexual deal (that is, sex) without having to pay the old price of commitment

Which
way will we have it? To be treated, sexually, exactly the same as men or differently
from them? That most women will reply neither or somewhere in between won't
solve the problem. This is especially true for young women trying to navigate
their way through to marriage. The rules controlling sexual behaviour used to
be most rigorously applied to girls under the age of 21 because adults feared
the volatile combination of raging hormones and emotional immaturity. If most
girls did not attend debutante balls, they were subject to other elaborate rituals
chaperoned parties and dances, dates with boys scrutinized and approved
by their parents, and the rather ruthless, hasty fashion with which they married
after that. Almost all the adults in a young woman's life conspired, whether she
liked it or not, to protect her from predatory male sexual advances and romantic
recklessness. Today, in our eagerness to abandon this constrained existence, we've
made it almost impossible for teenagers to avoid having sex before the age of
18. The ideal of sexual freedom is now so zealously adhered to that aside from
the sexual instruction high school teenagers receive, many universities no longer
maintain separate dormitories and bathrooms for men and women. If young men and
women are going to bathe together, eat together, and study together, we can fully
expect that they will sleep together. And of course, they do find suitable husbands
(or to get their M.R.S., as the joke went). Young women arrive on campus today
as much expecting to explore their sexual independence as furthering their knowledge
of history and literature.

All of this might be cause for celebration
evidence of our modern sexual enlightenment if sexual liberation had turned
out the way it was supposed to, with men and women sleeping together as often
as they wish, serenely and without consequence. But its failure, in fact, is perfectly
demonstrated in these academic petri dishes, where sexual egalitarianism has been
taken to its natural extreme and feminist reaction against men is at its most
vehement and hysterical. On campuses across the country, scores of female students
join in the annual Take Back the Night March to protest the alleged pervasiveness
of male sexual violence. It's now customary at these demonstrations for women
to stand before microphones and intimately describe not only egregious acts of
male brutality to which they've fallen victim but more often the details of their
everyday sexual embarrassments and humiliations: the time a man interpreted a
miniskirt and flirtatious manner as a come-on; the regret one felt for having
drunken sex with a frat boy. In the telling, these incidents are given the same
moral weight as rape. A woman is not expected to accept responsibility for actions
on her part that may have misled or confused the man; the man is always at fault
for viewing the woman as an object of lust, no matter how provocative her manner
or dress. In the new feminist understanding of male sexuality, a man must be punished
for merely his hope of having sex with a woman. As for women, a friend of mine
likes to joke, they no longer demand the right to free sex but to good sex: A
fling that a woman finds pleasurable, no matter how casual, is not considered
date rape. But the woman who wakes up the next morning feeling a little tawdry,
wondering what it was that possessed her to have sex with him, may decide it wasn't
her fault after all; somehow she must have been bullied into it, and thus raped.

Quite naturally, some young women have stepped forward to protest this chilling
view of sex; like the writers Katie Roiphe and Kate Fillion, Karen Lehrman, and
Rene Denfield. They compare the new feminists to prudish Victorians who regard
women as frail flowers, helpless in the clutches of amorous men. We're not victims!
they declare. And so they're not at least not of what they think. For it's
one thing to insist that women are perfectly capable of saying yes or no to sex
and that they should be held just as responsible for their actions as men (bravo).
Its another to pretend, as these women do, that women face no innate disadvantages
in a world of sexual licence. At least the radical feminists, in their crazed
way, understand that female sexual freedom flourishes only if male sexual freedom
is severely curbed. If women are going to have the right to dress and behave
as they please, the right to be sluts, then we shall have to crack down on
the inevitable male reaction. For men have not, over the past two decades, suddenly
become more beastly, savage creatures as the hysterics would have us believe.
Rather, they are responding to our behaviour in a wholly predictable way. The
woman who puts on a short skirt, teases her hair, gets tipsy, and with every gesture
signals her sexual availability, should not be surprised at the end of the evening
that the man does, in fact, expect sex. Nor should she be surprised when, after
lustily falling into bed with a man before she's even certain of his last name,
he seems startled that she expects more of him than a one-night stand. What should
surprise her is that there is no longer any social disapproval of their behaviour.
The feminists who prowl college campuses detecting harassment in a football player's
wink may be unwilling to acknowledge female sexual responsibility, as their critics
say; but they are also reacting to the consequences of a liberty that did not
work out for women as its apostles hoped.

Still, to question whether the sexual
revolution actually improved women's lives or harmed them seems a pointlessly
old-fashioned exercise, such as debating whether starving or feeding is best for
treating colds. In reconsidering all the ways in which women's lives and attitudes
have changed in a generation, very few critics would be willing to say that women's
sexual liberation has been an altogether bad thing. And how could they? As a female
friend and I walked from the movie theatre one evening after watching Emma, I
wondered if we or any women like us would seriously be willing to
don the late-20th-century equivalent of a corset and restrain our sex lives in
order to promote marriage and monogamy. It would seem absurd to tell women
who are working as corporate executives, flying fighter planes, seeking graduate
degrees that they should have to wait for marriage to have sex; it would
be akin to treating them like those young Second World War GI's, who were seen
as old enough to die for their country but not to take a sip of whisky. And it
would seem especially absurd to abstain if a woman is not even planning to get
married until she is in her late 20s or early 30s. She may well wonder, Why bother?

But there is good reason to bother. If women do, by and large, wish to reunite
sex with love, to regain male commitment, and to restore trust and civility between
men and women the most appealing aspects of traditional morality
then we are going to have to be prepared to put up with some of its restrictions,
too. Instead of embracing the slut within us as Naomi Wolf advises in her book
Promiscuities, we should reject her, just as we should reject men who use women
and escape social if not legal! consequences for their sexual behaviour.

Of course, we may wish to continue to do as we do now and pretend that sexual
differences do not exist, that women are every bit as sexually free and nonchalant
as men. But if we do wish to carry on with this pretense, then we should not express
astonishment or resentment when men behave more badly than they used to or show
less inclination to stay with us, or that sex generally feels more meaningless.
After all, when something becomes widely and cheaply available, its value usually
goes down, too. Acknowledging sexual difference, however, does not require us
to accept the hostile, invidious feminist view either that men are innately
violent and lustful while women are always blameless. It does not require us to
see ourselves as victims, as weaker than, or inferior to, men. The new understanding
of sexual differences might simply be found in the old understanding if we were
willing to restore it and polish it up a bit.

That understanding recognized
the unique and often mysterious traits we instinctively think of as being masculine
and feminine, traits that have persisted despite all the ideological sandblasting
of the past three decades. They are too subtle and elusive to be inscribed in
law. They confound both poets and social scientists. But they are differences
that complement each other that ignite passion and sexual attraction, give
love its depth and emotional sustenance, and ultimately form women into mothers
and wives and men into fathers and husbands. By denying these differences, we
prolong the period when we are sexually vulnerable; we waste the opportunity of
our most passionate and youthful years to find lasting love and everything that
goes with it: home, children, stability, and the pleasure of sex as an expression
of profound, romantic, and monogamous love. We have traded all this away for an
illusion of sexual power and, in doing so, have abandoned the customs that used
to protect and civilize both sexes, that constrained men and women but also obliged
them to live up to their best natures. We might now be more free. But we enjoy
less happiness, less fulfillment, less dignity, and, of all things, less romance.

Acknowledgement

The Author

Danielle Crittenden's numerous articles and essays have appeard in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, NationalReview, the Ladies Home Journal, Redbook, and Reader's Digest. A former columnist for The New York Post, she is a frequent commentator on women's issues for national television and radio. Crittendon is married to journalist and author David Frum. She is the author of amandabright@home and What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us: Why Happiness Eludes The Modern Woman.